Free Women Sailors & Sailors' Women by David Cordingly Page A

belowdecks was damp, dark, and reeking of tar, bilge water, and unwashed bodies, life on deck was equally forbidding in an entirely different way. There the female sailor was at the mercy of the boatswain’s lash and the physical demands of sailing in all weathers. Even in light breezes, she must constantly haul on coarse ropes and climb aloft to handle the sails, but in heavy weather she must make her way across a heaving, slippery deck in driving rain and stinging clouds of salt spray. If called on to do so, she must clamber up the shrouds and out onto the yardarms that would be swinging in a slow, giddy arc backward and forward above the ocean. A missed foothold or handhold could mean a fall resulting in death or a crippling injury.
    So how did a young woman cope with this? Most working-class women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were accustomed to a hard life that involved long hours and a great deal of physical labor so that, provided the female sailor was reasonably strong and fit, she would not have found most of the demands of the sailors’ work beyond her. She obviously had to develop a head for heights, and this proved the undoing of at least one woman. Captain Malony was short of hands when his ship
Daedalus
put in to the port of St. Johns, New Brunswick, in 1835. He went to the local jail, and the governor supplied him with an apparently robust and able-bodied seaman who went by the name Thomas Hanford. The
Daedalus
had been at sea for some time when a gale blew up and all hands were sent aloft to reef the topsails. Thomas reluctantly climbed toward the mizzentop but there his courage failed him. He came down and confessed to the mate that he was a woman whose real name was Sarah Busker. The captain agreed that for the rest of the voyage to London she should work in the cabin as a servant. She had already made a previous voyage to Labrador on a fishing boat but now decided to give up further thoughts of the sea. 13
    The sex of a female sailor named Rebecca Young was revealed in a tragic accident that came about because she was too confident of her ability to go aloft. She had spent two years sailing out of the Thames estuary on a hatch-boat. She went by the name Billy Bridle and dressed herself in a sailor’s trousers, shirt, jacket, and neckerchief. One afternoon in June 1833, she challenged a man to climb the masthead with her, and after some hesitation he joined her at the maintop. She urged him to go higher, and they both climbed to the topmast crosstrees. After sitting there for a few minutes the man was called down. Five minutes later Rebecca followed, but in attempting to slide down the topgallant halyards, she burnt her hands so badly that she was forced to let go and fell twenty feet to the deck. She died on the spot, and an inquest held at the town hall in Gravesend a few days later returned a verdict of accidental death. 14
    Most of the women who went to sea were able to cope with working aloft, and several excelled at it. We have already seen that William Brown was promoted to captain of the foretop, and Mary Ann Arnold, who served as a cabin boy on a number of merchant ships, was commended by her captain in 1839: “I have seen Miss Arnold among the first aloft to reef the mizen-top-gallant sail during a heavy gale in the Bay of Biscay.” 15 But however active and courageous these women may have been, they still had to look like men. Or did they?
    The chief reason why women were so successful in fooling their shipmates was that they looked like adolescent boys. Every ship, whether naval or merchant, had several boys in the crew. Some were as young as nine or ten, and many were in their teens. The navy welcomed boys because they were quick and agile aloft, and they could be trained from a young age in the complexities of navigation and seamanship. Those training to be officers were often fully equipped to command a ship before the age of twenty, and an able seaman in his